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The Eurasian Politician - Issue 3 (February 2001)
Col. Stanislav Lunev, Jan. 4, 2001
Source: NewsMax.com, http://www.newsmax.com/
NEWSMAX.COM -- On Dec. 20 Russian special services celebrated their 83rd anniversary, the so-called Chekist's Day – a Soviet-era holiday commemorating the Dec. 20, 1917, establishment of the Communists’ secret police, the Cheka.
The Cheka later developed into NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Domestic Affairs), then into the MGB (Ministry for State Security), and then into the infamous KGB (Committee for the State Security), the dreaded repression machine that executed and imprisoned tens of millions of Russians.
For the first time in the history of Russia’s secret police a Russian president personally attended this celebration. Moreover, President Vladimir Putin urged his former colleagues to learn from the repressive past of Soviet special services and to apply their skills toward defending democracy. But of course, his own interpretation of this advice means less democracy and more totalitarianism.
Putin served for about 16 years in the KGB’s foreign intelligence and later in counterintelligence before this giant repressive machine broke up into several successor services in 1991. After the KGB breakup he remained in the secret police’s active reserve and in 1998-99 headed the KGB’s major successor in domestic spying, the FSB, or Federal Security Service.
"We remember the history of the security agencies. It is ambiguous, we know that," Putin said. "The easiest thing would be to reject our past. It is more important, in my view, to learn its lessons, regardless of how bitter they are, and along with the harshest criticism, to preserve the valuable aspects."
We know that Putin has put many of his former KGB colleagues into high-level government positions, a trend started by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Some Russian politicians and human rights activists have voiced fears that the former KGB lieutenant colonel might try to re-establish elements of the repressive Soviet system and crack down on democratic freedoms.
One of Putin's proteges and his successor as head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, has been more precise in his remarks, published in the Russian press especially to mark Chekist’s Day. He said that the main threat to Russia is that foreign intelligence services may "uncover the true plans of the new Russian government in what concerns domestic policy."
Actually, these words of Russia’s top domestic spy put a very big question mark on the nature of official government statements and on the government's real intentions. Why would it be necessary to cover up Moscow's "true plans" in domestic policy if they rest on the principles of democratic reform and free-market economy?
Patrushev also said that Western spy services have turned former Soviet allies in Eastern Europe into "a platform for intelligence operations against Russia."
Confirming the official statements of its leaders, the FSB spokesman announced that Russian counterintelligence had identified at least 400 foreign spies they planned to keep tabs on during 2000. He said that the FSB is currently dealing with more spies than ever before and had curtailed the "spying and other sabotage activities" of 11 agents recruited by foreign security services and those of more than 30 other foreign spies.
The FSB official did not specify if the total number of presumed foreign so-called uncovered spies are in the same category as Edmond Pope, whose "case" was fabricated by the FSB as a clear provocation against an American citizen. If so, they could not be in any way affiliated with the real intelligence business.
In other words, Russia’s secret police are trying to use these 400 so-called spy cases of Edmond Pope and others to justify their existence and value at a time when the primary activity of the FSB is repressing the Russian population, especially those people who do not accept the Kremlin’s idea about going back to the "glorious days" of its totalitarian past.
Putin has personally described these people as "cudgels," which in Russian means mindless pieces of wood.
Like its predecessor, the FSB cannot protect the country and its population from any real hostile activity. For example, the Russian special services failed to prevent an escalation of organized crime in this totally corrupt country, and cannot fight against it because of its own involvement with criminal society.
Of course, not all of the Russian secret police officials are corrupt – some of them are motivated by service to their country and its people. But all of them are providing their services to the totally corrupt Kremlin regime and therefore cannot be isolated from this regime’s criminal activity.
Russia’s secret police couldn’t protect the Russian people from terrorist activity and didn’t stop the flow of weapons-related technologies to so-called rogue states.
But the secret police traditionally are very good in the fabrication of false "spy cases" and in repressing their own people.
Recently, one of the leading Russian human rights advocates, the former dissident Sergei Grigoriants, expressed his fears that President Putin is moving the country back toward Soviet-style restrictions on human rights and civil liberties.
"We are defending human rights as we did 12 years ago, and we might soon have to work underground as we did 20 years ago," he said.
As the Russian press has been reporting, Russia’s secret police, just as in the Soviet era, are now recruiting people in every governmental institution, in political parties, public organizations, and in all other entities, mainly in an effort to keep total control over the population. In the framework of this system every other person has to report about another, and a second one has to report about the first one.
Said Nikolai Fedorov, governor of the central Chuvashia [Chuvassistan] region: "We are now on a receding wave taking us back in time. … Some people might not realize it but we are returning to the 1950s or '30s," he told Russia’s NTV, referring to the time of mass repression under Josef Stalin.
In Fedorov’s words, "instead of a democratic Russia, over the past months we have been building a bureaucratic Russia. It is obvious that instead of a federative Russia, a strongly centralized Bolshevik Russia is being built." He charged that President Putin currently is taking Russia back to the darkest days of communist rule.
There is no doubt that the FSB and Russia's other special services are an extremely powerful tool for Kremlin leaders in their drive to restore a totalitarian regime in the country where democracy never existed to begin with. At the same time it’s a very effective machine for the realization of Putin’s plans to restore Russia’s international influence and to challenge the U.S. leadership of the so-called unipolar world.
Unfortunately, present-day Russia is very different from what it was at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Mostly friendly to the U.S. eight years ago, because of its special services activity Russia is now becoming more and more anti-American, and the new people in the White House have a giant job ahead to change this unhappy and dangerous development.
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Colonel Lunev is the highest ever GRU (Soviet/Russian Military
Intelligence) officer defected to the West.
Reproduced with the permission of
NewsMax.com. All rights reserved.